One of the major issues related to teaching an introductory programming course is the excessive amount of time spent on the language's syntax, which leaves little time for developing skills in program design and solution creativity. The wide variation in the students' backgrounds, coupled with the traditional classroom (one size-fits-all) teaching strategy, and bounded course duration, makes it extremely difficult for an instructor to go beyond adequate syntax coverage, to developing and enhancing the student's problem solving abilities. The solution to this dilemma is provided by a teaching environment that transforms and enhances traditional classroom teaching with a customized software teaching tool. The authors proposed, developed, and tested a software tool for teaching a first course in programming languages. The tool was used in teaching one of four sections of a programming course in their institution with favorable comparative results. This paper presents the comparative results of testing the teaching tool on an introductory computer programming course. The authors' results indicate that the tool was very effective in improving the students' performance in learning the programming concepts and reducing the time spent on syntax coverage. (Contains 4 figures and 6 tables.)